‘A commonwealth is the proper management of a gathering of families’, affirmed the pioneering economic thinker Martín González de Cellorigo in 1600. ‘Just as the well-ordered family is a true image of the commonwealth’, he went on, so the magistrates must in the home set the example for good order in the city at large. Shortly before this, the political philosopher Juan Costa had published an influential treatise on The rule of the citizen (1575). Its title was significant, as he sought to demonstrate that the responsible task of governing other people carried with it the obligation of personal self-discipline, to be learned in the bosom of the family. There was no distinction to be drawn between private and public life; rather, they were mutually reinforcing aspects of moral authority. It was ‘authority’ essentially which distinguished ‘citizens’, setting them apart from the ‘common labouring folk’. The citizen was responsible for the ‘soul’ of the city, which meant essentially its government. Hence, he had an obligation to marry and found a household – ‘a little commonwealth (república)’, as Costa termed it. Here he would ‘learn to govern his person, his household and family so that he can understand the best way to rule his community’.

The Romans called citizens padres de la patria, he told his readers, ‘so as to remind them that they must rule the people with the love they show their own children’. Costa wrote with a small-scale, face-to-face society in mind.